Why you fear the unknown — and what it can teach you | Maya Shankar, Simone Stolzoff

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.
We're taught that success means having a plan, knowing where we're headed and how to get there. But what happens when life throws us into the unknown?

**Simone Stolzoff** (0:19)
Even the term, embrace uncertainty, can feel sort of like gaslighting sometimes. It's like, I'm feeling incredibly scared and uncomfortable, and you're telling me to embrace it. Like, no, screw you. I don't want to embrace that.

**Elise Hu** (0:31)
Exactly.

**Simone Stolzoff** (0:32)
But I think there's something about understanding that uncertainty doesn't necessarily mean a threat. Even though that's the way that our biology is wired, uncertainty can also be that birthplace of possibility.

**Elise Hu** (0:46)
That's journalist and author Simone Stolzoff. In a recent conversation with cognitive scientist, Maya Shankar, who hosts the popular podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, the two have spent years thinking about uncertainty and change from different angles. And they're honest enough to admit that sitting with the unknown is still hard, even when you know the science. In this conversation, they draw from their new books, Simone's How to Not Know and Maya's The Other Side of Change, to explore why our discomfort with not having the answers might actually be holding us back in what we might find if we stopped running from it. Because what if uncertainty and life's unpredictable moments aren't the obstacles, but the door to resilience, growth, and a world of new possibilities? That conversation is coming right up after a short break.
And now, our TED Conversation of the day.

**Simone Stolzoff** (1:49)
There was a study that was done in the University of College London where researchers split participants into two groups. And in one group, they were given an 100% chance of receiving a really painful electric shock.
And in the other group, they were given a 50% chance of receiving a painful electric shock. And fascinatingly, they found that people in the second group, people who had a 50% chance, were far more anxious and stressed than people in the 100% chance group. So somehow we would rather a certain bad thing happen to us than have to deal with the ambiguity of not being sure. I'm curious from your perspective, what are the implications of a study like this? What does it say about our societal or our individual ability to navigate what we don't know?

**Maya Shankar** (2:40)
Yeah, I mean, I think it makes so much sense that we as humans evolved to be this way.
It's very helpful for us to be prediction machines that are constantly trying to anticipate future risks and trying to get ahead of them and solve for the future. The downside to that is that there are lots of changes that are truly outside of our control and no amount of planning will rescue us from the situations. And in those moments, our brains can kind of short circuit. I definitely feel like that study describes me to a T. I would rather know how the story ends. I would rather have clarity on the outcome.
I was just actually reading a book for an upcoming podcast interview on a slight change of plans. And this woman cited a study. She's a, she's a physician. And she was talking about how people are way more stressed during that intervening period when they're not sure what the medical result is. When they're waiting on a test result than they are when they actually find out what the disease is. And that was really interesting to me, because when I reflect back on my life, at the moments when I felt the most deeply anxious, the most unsure, my life and my, and when my wellbeing is most, has been most compromised, it is in those periods where there is some uncertainty. And I wonder, Simone, if it's because we, because we lack that agency in those moments, we're just grasping to try to figure out how we might be able to change the situation. And in moments of uncertainty, we have the illusion that our involvement could actually move the needle, but after we receive the actual information, it feels more set in stone.

**Simone Stolzoff** (4:22)
Yeah, I think this is very relatable for anyone who is dealing with maybe professional uncertainty or uncertainty about what decisions they want to make about their future lives. I think we can think about this from an evolutionary perspective. If you imagine an ancestor of ours in the jungle, if they hear a rustle in the bushes and they're not sure the source of that noise, that uncertainty could potentially be fatal.